Monthly Archives: June 2015

Mammography’s Shadows, VII: Legacies

Good science gives the same answer to questions posed by both male and female investigators.  But good science normally only answers questions as they are posed.  In the case of breast cancer, ordinarily only females experience the disease, with its attendant costs to themselves—and opportunities for others.  The same is true for current breast cancer […]

Mammography’s Shadows, VI: The National Cancer Institute Weighs In

Like all federal agencies the National Cancer Institute is subject to indirect political pressure through congressional and executive branch control of agency budgets.  Such pressure can and does influence programmatic decisions. That had been the case with the Breast Cancer Demonstration Project of the 1970s (see this blog’s post for May 25, 2015, “Mammography’s Shadows: […]

Mammography’s Shadows, V: The Doctrine Unravels

The American Cancer Society continues to advise “women age 40 and older” to have a mammogram “every year and should continue to do so for as long as they are in good health.” Most privately operated medical institutions in the United States, reliant as they are on revenue streams from diagnostic and treatment procedures, echo […]

Mammography’s Shadows, IV: Hunting Cancer with X-Rays

All of us come into the world designed by evolution to survive.  Failing some rare mishap, we arrive equipped with immune systems ready to do battle with unfriendly biologic mischief makers.  The wizards within us that enable this microscopic life-preserving enterprise reside in the nuclei of our 75-100 trillion cells. Just as millions of  ‘0s’ […]